The climax was fast approaching. After four years of occupation, terrorism, brutality, and clandestine warfare, the French were preparing to come into the open to fight for their country. In April and May even the doubters of a French victory began leaving their boltholes, declaring they had always known the Germans would be thrown out of the country, and expressing belated willingness to fight. The first signs of this change of heart showed in the GMRs – the Pétain-supporting reserves. Up to April we had come across only one or two of their commanders who were pro-Maquis, and willing to help France by looking the other way, or warning us before attacks came in. But in the spring of 1944, group after group of GMRs made only feint attacks on Maquis camps and, in many instances, a commander would say: ‘Leave a couple of guns for us to capture, go away for a couple of hours, and we won’t even burn your camp down.’ In the main they kept their word, and only occasionally were the Maquis double-crossed by a commander who pressed home a fierce attack. When that happened the GMRs always suffered badly, for the Maquis did not take kindly to treachery, and in one fight they killed 300 or more GMRs in a cold-blooded counterattack. This, too, helped to make the GMRs less aggressive.
Some weeks before the Allies landed, Romans and I began the talks which produced our master plan: Le Plan Vert. In the 10,000 square miles of the Ain, we would kill all the Germans in the area, and put an end to all rail transport through the Department. It was an ambitious programme to launch, and Romans and I spent many hours talking with commanders, civilians and members of the Armée Secrète, before every detail had been worked out and every person briefed. Put simply, we intended to eliminate all the Germans who manned outposts – like the one at the crossroads at La Cluse – take over the towns of Hauteville, Bellegarde, Nantua and Oyonnax, and run them on a proper basis, maintaining the normal services like electricity, and producing more food and clothing which would be shared out by ration cards and clothing coupons we would print ourselves. We also arranged to set up a military tribunal to try offenders against our laws (which were based on the laws of France) and to bring in the gendarmerie to police the towns. We talked with civilians in these towns whom we knew were pro-Maquis and pro-France, and appointed them to head the various civil government departments, like electricity, water and so on. Chiefs and deputies at the main headquarters of the gendarmeries were approached to gain their support, or get their word that there would be no attempt to dispute our control.
The aims of our talks with the Armée Secrète were twofold: to ask them to garrison the towns, and to carry out attacks against the Germans in towns like Bourg and Ambérieu, where there were main garrisons too big for us to take over. The Armée Secrète were eager and agreed with every request that Romans, who was their commander, put to them. They promised to put up road blocks on the main roads out of the towns, to try to prevent German troops recapturing our area. They were to fight hard at these blocks, and the Germans were astounded to find Resistance men actually battling in the streets, for they believed all the fighters were in the mountains with the Maquis. The Armée Secrète were briefed also to attack certain railway lines and so sever rail communications in areas outside the Maquis control.
The main task of the Maquis was to blow up every railway line running through the Ain and to keep them cut, if necessary, for weeks at a time. This was done, and when London requested a particular line to be put out of commission for a week, then it was unusable for a week. In addition, the Maquis were to man road blocks on every road into the Ain to prevent the Germans entering the liberated area. Chabot and Montréal, our commanders, were briefed on the outposts held by the Germans, and instructed to draw up plans to wipe out every man. This delighted them and they were overwhelmed with volunteers for the task.
The successful feeding of the townspeople – there were about 15,000 in all taking in some of the larger villages – depended on two things: intelligence reports on German food trains which we planned to derail, and the preparedness of Jean Miguet and his transport section. We had talks with our friends the Cheminots about future train movements and, as always, they were only too willing to do anything which could embarrass the Germans. As for Miguet, this quiet, capable man, he declared himself ready to handle any transport problem we might run into. He told us, proudly, that he could provide 200 or more lorries and vans with drivers and mates, and, providing we had the men available to act as loaders, he would always have sufficient vehicles to clear a wrecked train, and handle parachute drops at the same time.
At this time Romans and I were pestered by former French officers who, realising that the invasion was upon us and that France stood to win, came out of their homes dressed in their best army uniforms and demanding entry into the Maquis. Many of them came to us and said: ‘Right, I am a colonel as you can see – give me troops to command to fight these damn Germans. What men and equipment can you let me have?’
Romans and I were amazed at their effrontery and we knew that even if they were fine soldiers, none of the Maquis, some of whom had been living a life of hardship and hard fighting for a couple of years or so, would accept them.
‘Give you command! You, who have sulked in your homes throughout the whole of these times – nonsense,’ Romans would explode. ‘My men don’t want you, and I’m not even going to suggest to them that you lead them. They would think I was mad.’
We christened these former officers the ‘Mothball Brigade’– Les Naphthalinés – as all their uniforms had been carefully pressed and stored in mothballs for years. You could smell them.
I thought, however, and Romans agreed, that they should be given the opportunity to make up for their timidity, and it was suggested to them that they made up their own groups. They readily agreed, and I was able to arrange for stores operations to be given to them so, when the Plan Vert was put into operation, there were several hundred other men under arms. Some of them fought well, but their losses were high as they had not learned the proper guerrilla tactics. They insisted on the stand-up-and-fight method.
One incident, I think, shows the attitude of the Frenchman in the Ain at that time. On 19 May, a farmer called Prosper – his real name was Claudius Charvet of Saint Julien-Sur-Veyle-Vonnas – ran a small AS group, but lived and ran his farm with his wife at the same time. Prosper was known as ‘Un point, c’est tout’. He got the nickname at an arms drop I conducted some time earlier in which the SAP men – part of the FFI supply force – wanted to claim some of the stores and arms sent down. Prosper told them: ‘Non. Les Colonels Xavier et Romans ont dit … Un point, c’est tout.’
Anyway, Prosper was at home late one evening with his wife when a machine-gun opened up outside and grenades crashed through some of the downstairs windows. Prosper had been given away to the Milice by a collaborator, and they had launched their attack to capture him and force him to give information. Prosper put all the lights out and slipped away from his home through the farm buildings, leaving his wife behind. He feared she might be killed, but he knew he could not deal with the Milice on his own and decided to try to find some of his men. The Milice broke into his farm and started to ransack his house for papers, which they believed gave details of the Armée Secrète and his own group. They beat Prosper’s wife so badly that she lost an eye, but she told them nothing. Eventually they gave up their search and emptied the larder of its good wine and fresh meat – both most difficult to come by in those days. They sat at the great wooden table – thinly lined with linoleum in the French custom – and started to eat and drink, ignoring the injured woman.
Prosper, in the meantime, rounded up twenty of his men, all armed with guns and grenades, and the group made their way back to the farmhouse. On their way across the fields they met a farm girl who told Prosper that his wounded wife had slipped away. Only the Milice remained in his house.
‘Come,’ Prosper told his men, ‘we’re going to attack my farm.’ The Resistance men hurled grenades and poured fire through the windows, killing seven of the Milice, who then withdrew. The following day they returned and burnt down the farm – but Prosper had left and taken to the Maquis.
He always laughed at the raiders. ‘There was the Milice eating at my table, drinking my wine, and damned good wine too, much too good for them; and all the time my papers were under their soup plates.’ For he had spread out his papers beneath the linoleum.
During the last part of April and through most of May, sporadic attacks were made on individual Maquis camps by four to five hundred Germans. But our men in both the north and south of the Ain were now experts in this sort of warfare, and although they lost a few men and had their camps burnt, they inflicted heavy casualties in those early spring days, when the nights were warm and the trees green once more.
At the end of May, I was at one command post in the northern Ain when a courier came in. ‘Xavier, the Germans are pulling out of La Cluse,’ he said. This was odd. Then, over the following few days, we got reports of the Germans pulling out of the whole Maquis area of the Ain. One of the commanders suggested that someone had informed on us, but then I pointed out that the Germans would reinforce their posts if they believed they were in danger, not pull out. I thought that the German commander of the Ain was being very sensible, for he too must have realised D-Day was not far ahead and that the Ain, geographically, was asking to be taken over by the French. He knew how strong we were from the losses they had suffered since February, and continued to suffer during the April and May attacks. But all of us, particularly Montréal, were angry that several hundred Germans would escape death at the hands of the Maquis. As it was, there were only two or three very small pockets of Germans left on D-Day and Montréal had no trouble in annihilating them.
The fifth of June dawned clear, and brought the SOE message that we had so long awaited: Stand by for D-Day. I alerted Romans, Chabot and Montréal, as soon as Paul, very excited, brought me the signal. Romans passed the word to his commanders in the Armée Secrète and, for security’s sake, these men were told to say nothing but be ready for action at any moment. I felt very emotional, for the endless journeyings through the sectors had made me very tired. Every trip had become a major expedition, every checkpoint a major anxiety, and the national habit of the French – to be late for every appointment – made me more and more frustrated. I knew it was impossible for me to be relieved, as no one would have a hope in hell of taking over from me at that time, and I realised I must go on until I was either captured again or the Germans were thrown out of France. So the message brought me succour. It would not be long now, I thought, before I would be with my own countrymen again, freed of the burden of living a secret life. To be an ‘agent’ sounds romantic, but it was a very wearying task which had been getting me down up to the time that signal came through. Now I had a new vigour, and I prayed that the worst was over.
I was astonished to receive an SOE message early the next morning that the Allies had landed in Normandy. I expected we would have had to wait at least two or three days after the stand-by. What excitement; I have never seen such excitement as there was in that derelict farmhouse HQ in the early hours of 6 June. Romans and I laughed together, long and loud, so immense was our feeling of relief. There were toasts, shouts of ‘Vive La France. Vive l’Anglais’, and my hand was shaken time and time again. Laughing men slapped each other’s shoulders and kept repeating: ‘They’ve arrived, they’ve arrived.’ We drank champagne. But at the end of fifteen minutes or so, I restored order and sent our couriers out to our commanders to put into operation our own D-Day, Le Plan Vert.
If the landings had been made a few minutes earlier, just before midnight on 5 June, I would have won a bet with twenty of my officers. As it was I had to buy them all dinner. Within an hour or so of the landings the area was isolated from the rest of France. Every road into the Department was blocked, and no one could use one without a laissez-passer issued by our headquarters. All trains came to a halt, and the two main lines to the north, through Bourg and Bellegarde – the only rail exits – were immobilised. For more than four weeks not one ton of supplies, or one platoon of soldiers, managed to reach the north – and the invasion sector – from our area of southeast France.
The first major disruption to German communications came that same night of D-Day, 6 June, less than twenty-four hours after we had celebrated the Allied landings.
Some weeks before, while drawing up Le Plan Vert, Romans and I had decided that the railway junction at Ambérieu, heavily guarded and with reinforcements readily available from the German garrison there, could form one of our main targets to disrupt communications. We called in our friends the Cheminots, the railway workers who were some of the most patriotic men I ever met in France. They were all anti-German and went out of their way to help the Maquis, the Armée Secrète, and escaping prisoners alike. We asked them for details of the railway works in the town and they supplied us with detailed drawings of the machine shops, engine sheds, marshalling yards, signal boxes, a turntable, and, better still, told us that normally there were fifty to sixty railway engines most nights. These locomotives, they explained, were usually grouped together in sidings waiting to be hitched to trains the following morning.
This would obviously be a prime target for us, and if we could blow up fifty engines as well, our first strike against Germany on D-Day would be a severe one.
We called in Chabot, in whose area Ambérieu was, and told him the Cheminots’ news. He, as usual, was enthusiastic when we told him that his first task would be the attack on the junction. He brought in La Brosse, an explosives expert, and we discussed plans with him. La Brosse then raised his own team and trained them to blow up particular objectives at Ambérieu with plastic. Railway engines for instance required one small charge on one of the cylinders to immobilise them, and it took special parts and hours of work to get them going again. I worked with La Brosse in training the team and showed them the correct methods of fixing their charges and putting in fuses.
The Cheminots told us that there would be fifty-two engines on the sidings on the night of D-Day, so the day we had chosen fitted in very well with the Germans’ transport arrangements.
Chabot brought in Verduras and his men to his command post, which he had set up at a farm at Balvay, which overlooks the depot, as well as Mazaud, the man in charge of Les Enfants d’Autun, the camp used for training the Maquis. Verduras and Mazaud and their men, some 150 in all, were the fighting force to be used to fight off the German guards and the reinforcements that were bound to be brought in from the barracks, which were only a short distance from the junction, the instant the first guns started firing.
Romans and I watched the two groups, the saboteurs and the fighters, go off from the command post late at night and we had nothing more to do except wait – always a difficult task for me. Later we heard heavy fighting, explosions, and saw flashes of tracer round the railway depot and red glows as fires started. We had no news until the next morning, 7 June, when a runner said that the attack was a success, but that he had no details.
Later in the morning, Romans and I were sitting at a table talking in a tent when Chabot came in. He drew himself to attention in front of us, saluted and said: ‘Mission accomplie. But I regret to say that we only destroyed fifty-one locomotives out of the fifty-two there. I am very sorry.’ This report was given in such a solemn, sad way, that I looked at Romans and we both laughed. ‘Mon vieux – it is magnificent. Well done,’ we both said. At which Chabot’s serious face creased into a smile and we drank to his success in wine.
Chabot then gave us the details. The explosives group slipped into the depot after the fighting force dealt with the German guards, some of whom were shot. The noise of the shooting brought dozens of Germans to the depot and a running fight developed as the Maquis fought to protect the saboteurs. Chabot, first into the depot, shot down a German NCO and later in the fight, jumped a German officer and killed him too after a hand-to-hand struggle on the ballast of the tracks. The Germans fought at a disadvantage, as they did not know the size of force they were against, and most of the Maquis had good cover behind heavy machinery or a railway engine, whereas the Germans had to advance over open ground in the sidings, or try to enter the machine shops through the doors. They were shot down as they were silhouetted against the night sky. All the charges were placed and Chabot instructed the sabotage team to get out as he led the rest of the men in a rearguard fight. Finally they disengaged, leaving a handful of dead Maquis in the depot, and cleared the town without further trouble, dispersing to their mountain camps. Chabot stayed behind to get accurate reports, and the Cheminots told him that the turntable, workshops, and fifty-one engines had been destroyed. The charge on the fifty-second failed to explode, and he and I thought that in the darkness, and under heavy fire, the saboteur had failed to set off the time-pencil. It had been a great raid and, as a bonus, Chabot and his teams killed dozens of Germans.
A little later Montréal did a similar job in his sector with the aid of a group of Armée Secrète, hitting the sidings and marshalling yards at Bourg, which is in the north-west of the Ain, and on the western fringe of Montréal’s area. He mounted the same type of operation as Chabot, went in with the first wave of Maquis, and gave covering fire to his sabotage team. Again it was a success and he destroyed fifteen engines and a turntable. The target was smaller than at Ambérieu, with no machine shops, but again, the raid hit rail communications very heavily.
These actions were typical of the loyal, brave, and efficient groups, and the commanders who ran the Ain. They stirred up no trouble in the political field, and gave Romans and myself little cause for anxiety over security. I wish all the men I met had been as co-operative. Our operations against communications were highly successful. German rail traffic had to be diverted farther to the west, where other groups – of which I knew nothing – did their part to hamper communications.
The line through Bellegarde – a town close to the Swiss border and on the edge of the Pays de Gex – was blocked by sending in two railway engines at high speed, one from each end of the long Bellegarde tunnel. When they met in the middle, with a very satisfying bang, nothing could get by. It took the Germans a long time to clear that tunnel when they finally fought their way back into the town. And we did not restrict our line-cutting to the Ain. Groups of the Armée Secrète and the Maquis ranged out of the liberated area to attack trains and tracks all around the edges of our ‘box’. We fought almost nightly battles with guarded food-trains, shooting soldiers and cleaning every ton of supplies from the trucks. We kept this up for four weeks, and Miguet and his transport team, as efficient as the Royal Army Service Corps, distributed thousands of tons of food to the towns, villages and Maquis camps in the area. More important, we kept other railway lines, linking east and west, cut for weeks; nothing moved except our own transport.
In the towns, local government was smoothly taken over. Many of the police worked with us, and those that did not were content to stay in their own barracks without interfering.
We also set up a military tribunal in Nantua to try both civil and military who offended against the law. The law was based on the laws of France before 1940 and under this, of course, traitors could be, and were, sentenced to death.
The tribunal was established by the Procureur de la République, a man called Davenas, and he arranged for it to be run by members of the Maquis, with a Maquis officer as president, four NCOs and some soldiers forming the rest of the court. The Commissaire de Gouvernement from Belfort, Monsieur Netter, was brought down from Belfort, and he sat as the equivalent of the Judge Advocate. All the people who faced charges were given the opportunity of choosing a defence lawyer from advocates in Nantua.
I spent one day at the tribunal, just to see how it was operating, and watched the usual string of small cases – breaking curfew, theft, and the like – dealt with swiftly and correctly by the court. One other man was tried for embezzlement, and during the trial it was also discovered he was one of the Milice, the French ‘Gestapo’, and we found out that he had been guilty of denouncing French people to the Germans – which was part of his job. He was found guilty of embezzlement and treason, was sentenced to death, and later executed. Other Miliciens were tried during the five weeks that the tribunal sat and they too were executed.
When the Germans took control of the town later, they carried out reprisals on some of the civilians, but none of the officers of the court were accused. It was enough for them to say that they had been forced to carry out the work – which was not true – for the Germans to leave them alone.
Printing presses produced our new ration cards, stamped with the mark ‘FFI’, and the population were very happy as they received more food during our liberation than they had done in the previous four years of occupation. We were able to increase their rations because we raided the dumps at the Germans’ quartermaster stores and added this food to the tons of flour, rice, and tinned stuff from derailed trains. It was, of course, late spring, and we were able to distribute fresh vegetables from the country areas.
A by-product of our train wrecking was the discovery, in nearly every one, of large piles of mail written by German soldiers to their families back in Germany. Much of this was examined and we gleaned some secrets from it, as the security of the German soldiers was not very good, and the censorship was poor. Many of the soldiers wrote about ‘Maquis atrocities’, which was part of the propaganda line fed to them in their barracks. There were no atrocities committed against the Germans in our area that I ever discovered – even though every German was hated by the Maquis. Certainly no soldier was ever beaten or tortured in the way masquisards were treated.
We always burnt all the mail after we had examined it. This must have had some small effect on morale in the Fatherland because little Fritz had not written his usual Sunday letter.
Romans was appointed Le Préfet de l’Ain, and he and I worked closely together, running both the military and civil affairs from our various command posts. We did not move into the towns, as much as the luxury of a bed, with sheets, and restaurant meals appealed to us. We stayed in the Maquis with our commanders, where Paul could communicate with us and where the couriers knew where to find us. We knew the Germans must react at some time and we couldn’t risk being caught in a major attack on a town, which might separate us from Chabot, Montréal, and Ravignan, the commander in the west.
Romans and I were lucky to have survived the first day of the Plan Vert, for we were nearly killed by mortar bombs. He and I had gone on a reconnaissance in the southern sector at the Col-de-la-Lèbe area, which is north of Virieu-le-Grand on the 3,000-foot-high road. We were with Chabot, Jean Miguet and Dédé de La Butte, lying in a hollow watching a German probing attack. Suddenly there were two major explosions a few feet from us, which blew Romans and me several feet. Mortar bombs. We heard fragments whine over us and around us. We had been seen and had to withdraw. If we had been hit, the whole control of the area would have passed into our commanders’ hands – and they did not know the whole picture, the contacts, the radio methods and so on. We were lucky to have escaped – the Maquis of the Ain was even more lucky to have missed chaos. The next day we were with Verduras in the south and had climbed some 3,000 feet up the Col-de-la-Lèbe again and were inspecting a Maquis road block which had been set up on the road leading from Artemare, when Verduras crawled towards us and grinned like a schoolboy.
‘Ha, Xavier,’ he laughed, ‘have you ever heard anything like this. Three of my Jugoslavs (he had a small number of them in his Maquis) smelled a plastic today for the first time and liked its perfume of pear drops. So they ate some. I’ve had to send one off to the doctor and the other two have a splendid gutache. They won’t do that again.’
The Germans were very active around the Col and Verduras fought them for three days, losing two killed and three wounded. His Maquis, including a boy of twelve, fought so well that the German group of about 500 men finally withdrew without pushing through the road block and forcing their way into the Ain.
Chabot was also with us that day at the road block where trees had been cut down to hold up any vehicle short of a tank. It had been planned to give the Maquis the advantage of height, and when I arrived the maquisards were in good cover in the trees, looking down the road to where the Germans had spread out and were firing with machine-guns and automatic weapons, trying to discover the strength of the Maquis. Later in the day they brought up an artillery piece, mounted on wheels, rather like the old French seventy-five or the British twenty-five pounder, and it became a damned nuisance. La Brosse, the man who led the saboteurs against the fifty-two railway engines at Ambérieu, was called in by Chabot. ‘Get that bloody gun,’ he told La Brosse. The big man took a bazooka, and crawled through the trees until he could see the gun firing in an open field. He destroyed it with his first shot.
The Germans eventually pulled out, leaving some dead, as they did on all these small, reconnaissance-type attacks.
For three weeks we had our way. The Maquis and the Armée Secrète fought a great guerrilla action which considerably helped the Allies by reducing the number of troops available to Rommel in his defence of the Atlantic Wall. Then reports came in from our intelligence workers outside the Ain: ‘German troops are massing. They must be planning to attack you.’
The obvious was to take place. The Germans were about to react. The first probes were made in the south, and all were beaten off by Chabot’s men. The next attacks came from the west, striking out of Bourg, a town which always had a big German garrison, now strengthened to deal with the Maquis take-over of the Ain. They were faced with Ravignan and his groups, and some of the ‘mothball’ groups. Again they were held, sustained losses, and retired. The ‘mothballers’ fought well, but they suffered more than the maquisards, who were better trained and more used to guerrilla tactics.
Meanwhile the Armée Secrète in the towns played a valuable part in harassing the Germans. They sent out patrols to attack tired German troops – who had been marching and fighting the Maquis all day – as they went back to their barracks. The Germans became more and more puzzled by these attacks as they thought all the Maquis were in the hills and mountains and would not dare to operate within a mile or so of German headquarters.
The attacks spread to the north, and Montréal faced more probes which came down the main roads. Again, one or two companies of German troops would make feint attacks to test the strength and disposition of the Maquis, and then pull out. Romans and I studied all the action reports from the Maquis commanders and, in our view, the main attack would be made in the north sector. The Germans needed the railways; they were not concerned with the towns and the population. Bellegarde, Nantua and Oyonnax, in German hands again, would free one of the main routes to the north, and they would once again be able to move troops and supplies. We warned Montréal, and asked for information from our friends in the Armée Secrète on troop concentrations and movements.
We finally got word that the Germans were massing to the north-east of the Ain and that it seemed probable they would try to make a drive down the Coel-de-la-Faucille, towards Bellegarde. Romans and I were in the west sector with Ravignan so we decided to leave for our command post in the centre of the Ain, where we would be more easily available to the northern sector if the threat developed. When we reached our post, couriers from Montréal reported that the Germans were launching a major attack with a large force, so we drove through the night to the Col, arriving at dawn. The Col, one of the best-known features of the region, sweeps down from the mountains in a steep, zigzag road, like the lacing of a shoe. We saw Montréal at the foot of the Col, where he had his command post, and he was unhappy about the pressure on his groups defending the higher regions. He led the way up to the ‘front’, to the local command post within sight of the Germans, and there we found Michel, Le Grand Michel as he became known, partly because he was big of heart. He was one of the more able commanders, and I approved of Montréal’s generalship in putting his group at the spearhead of the defence.
‘We badly need more bren-gun ammunition,’ Michel told me. I explained that I had already asked for more parachute drops, as so much ammunition had been used up beating off the reconnaissance attacks. He took us to the front group, well hidden on the mountainside, and with a wide field of fire against the attacking Germans. I saw hundreds of German troops cautiously climbing along the ‘laces’, stumbling on the rocks, to join up with the troops already in the firing line. These troops, professionals (vastly superior to the ragbags that German regiments became later in the war), were not at home in their exposed positions against guerrilla fighters tucked into niches in the mountains. They showed their nervousness by firing long bursts from machine-guns and automatic weapons, in contrast to the maquisards, who replied with single shots, showing they were unworried and using their heads. I turned to Michel: ‘There’s no need to tell your men to conserve ammunition; they couldn’t be more sparing than they are. Well done, your men are excellently trained.’
Some of the group noticed that regular ‘convoys’ were driving down the road to the Germans, consisting of four or five lorries with stores and guards, and a staff car, with two or three officers, sandwiched for protection between the lorries. Half a dozen maquisards went off to attack one of these convoys. They hid themselves at the top of a cutting, as steep as a cliff, by the roadside, and waited. When a convoy came through they dropped a ‘gammon’ – a large piece of plastic timed to explode within a couple of seconds – and it landed squarely on the staff car, killing the officers and the driver. But the maquisards barely got away. One told me: ‘Those Germans were so fast. They came straight up the side of that cliff as though they were walking down the Unter den Linden. We had to get away quickly.’ This alone showed the quality of the attackers, for rabble would have needed orders from an officer to set them moving.
After several hours Romans and I went back to Bellegarde and, sitting in the car with Miguet and Romans’ bodyguard, Dédé de La Butte, we discussed the situation. It was obvious that the Germans were going to force us to give up the Col; there were far too many of them to hold. So we agreed to fight a rearguard action for as long as possible.
Once the Germans got clear of the Col there was nothing to stop them moving into Bellegarde. But there was no point in using guerrilla fighters for a house-to-house battle with troops expertly trained in this sort of warfare, so all we could do was to use delaying tactics. Montréal agreed. ‘But, mes Colonels,’ he said, with his Errol Flynn-like gestures, ‘we will give them a very sore head before we let them in.’ He was right. With the groups of Michel, and Maxime, the former adjutant, he fought thousands of crack German troops for five days and nights, giving ground foot by foot, crevice by crevice, in one of the finest organised rearguard actions ever fought by the Maquis. Company after company of German troops were sent in waves to try to break through the slim line of Maquis, never more than 150-strong. The maquisards held firm, firing single shots and making every bullet count and bombing the Germans with grenades when they got too close. Finally, Montréal gave the order to pull out, and the Germans once again took over Bellegarde.
For a month the men of the northern sector had controlled the town, and it was a month worth the sacrifice of the handful of maquisards who died in the fight for the Col. The Maquis action had gained priceless time for the invading Allies and saved them from suffering far greater casualties.
The Germans immediately started to clear the Bellegarde tunnel of the two wrecked locomotives, to re-open a south-north line through the Ain which could be used to reinforce their armies in the north. It took them some time to shift the tons of twisted steel, and, as soon as the tunnel was clear, the Maquis hit back, blowing up the track with plastic, day after day. Only a small force of Germans occupied Bellegarde; the rest, still many thousands strong, switched their attack southwest, towards Nantua. The Maquis went into action again, tired after a week’s solid fighting, but encouraged by their successful rearguard of the Col. Montréal and I gave the orders to attack, and the groups were led by Michel and Maxime.
The first objective of the Germans was Trebillet on the way to Nantua, where another tunnel had been blocked. They came on with great determination, and it seemed as if they must win control of the village within hours when Romans and I, still being driven by Miguet, arrived at the front.
We met Maxime walking down the road towards us, grinning. ‘We’ve held them,’ he said. Again the same 150 men had proved a match for several regiments of German troops. I watched the maquisards, and was again impressed by their disciplined fighting. I told the two group commanders: ‘You must pull out if it looks as though they may overrun you.’ They agreed. But those magnificent men held Trebillet for five days, broke the spirit of the troops opposing them, killed many dozens, and only withdrew when a major frontal attack, made by hundreds of troops, was launched. They might even have held that, but the Germans, desperate now to break through, made a secondary attack on the flank with a force brought down from Saint Claude to the north of the Maquis defences. These men joined up with units from the German garrison in the west at Bourg, after marching through the villages at Dortan and Thoirette.
Typically, the Germans showed their fury and frustration by attacking civilians. They burnt, pillaged, raped, and tortured in the way that had become expected of them. They set fire to Dortan and Thoirette, and, at Sieges, a tiny hamlet en route from Saint Claude to Bourg, they captured three members of the Maquis who had somehow become detached from their group.
Two of the maquisards were shot down straight away, but the ‘treatment’ was reserved for Lieutenant Naucourt. We found his body after the Germans left. He was naked, his eyes had been gouged out, his arms broken, and a fire had been lit under his testicles. Such bestial treatment only stiffened the hatred and resolve of the Maquis and the Armée Secrète. If high morale meant hatred, then morale was very high.
For all the German might, we still held most of our liberated area. We had lost Bellegarde and control of the strategic road which runs from Nantua to Bellegarde. But the rest of our section, apart from an indentation on the eastern fringe, was still clear of the enemy. We intended to hold on to it if we could, but we badly needed more supplies. I had arranged some drops in June and had, for instance, been able to give Michel the bren ammunition he needed. The drops had all gone well, but the supplies only allowed us to keep abreast of expenditure in ammunition and weapons. I wanted a really big drop so that we would have ‘something in the bank’ with which to meet the major push the Germans must surely be planning. I told Paul to impress on London that this was an absolute necessity. He smiled, said ‘Sure thing,’ and wandered off in his ragged clothes. He was still giving away his good clothes to those he considered more deserving than himself, and he was also being ‘mother’ to the crew of an American Liberator which force-landed in the area. ‘I’ll take care of them in case they get into trouble,’ he told me when the bunch of tired, surprised Yanks were brought into the camp.
I received an almost immediate, and very surprising reply to my demands. ‘Can arrange to send you thirty-six aircraft. Can you deal with them in daylight?’ the SOE asked. This was magnificent; it would bring close to 400 tonnes of supplies in one go. Certainly it would be a major operation, in sight of the Germans, but Romans and I agreed that – providing we had defence in depth and transport available – we could handle a daylight drop. I signalled back, naming two dropping zones, one at Izernore and the other at Port, and SOE agreed to both zones. We would only know which one they would use on the morning of the drop.
I worked out that something like 700 men would be needed representing a dozen Maquis camps – to protect both zones against any German attack. I also decided that the supplies would be divided on the spot and sent in lorries and vans to the various groups. Miguet borrowed extra lorries from friends in Oyonnax for the occasion, and as it was essential that our transport should not be held up by crowded streets, everyone in Nantua was ordered to stay indoors on the morning of the drop. Nantua was only 8 miles away from the level ground at Izernore, a smooth plateau some 3,000 feet high, and the thunder of thirty-six low-flying aircraft would quickly awake the highly excitable citizens of the Ain.
The Port ground was left to the Maquis to handle, and the ‘mothballers’ brigade – who were to receive a large proportion of the cargo – were responsible for defending the ground at Izernore. I saw the commander of this brigade early on the morning of the chosen day and told him, truthfully, that I did not know which ground would be used. I do not think he believed me. Anyway Romans and I, using our well-developed pifométres, felt certain that Izernore would be chosen, so I left the chief ‘mothballer’ and went there. It was a sunny day, with wisps of white cloud, and the whole of the plateau was green and beautiful, and filled with excited members of the Maquis.
It was almost 10 a.m. when we heard the hum of approaching aircraft from the north. Then we saw them, a fleet of American Liberators protected by dozens of wheeling, diving fighters. They flew, line abreast, in three squadrons, and as they roared over Nantua, the townsfolk crowded on to rooftops and balconies, waving, cheering, crying with emotion and excitement.
The planes flew towards us at a height of about 500–600 feet, and it was a wonderful sight to see the glinting wings, in perfect alignment, and then blossoming of the great, multi-coloured parachutes as containers tumbled from the bellies of the aircraft. It was all over in a couple of minutes, then the armada wheeled, and climbed towards home. The sight of them immensely improved the morale of the people of the Ain, for it showed that the Allies could operate over French territory just when they wanted to. Also the fact that the Maquis could call on such massive support, in daylight – without interference from the Germans – showed the strength of the Resistance and its value to the Allies.
The next six hours were spent sharing out the supplies and loading them into Miguet’s transport fleet. By four o’clock every gun, round of ammunition and pair of boots had been cleared. Only once was I interrupted, and that was by the furious commander of the ‘mothballers’, who claimed I deliberately misled him and that his men had wasted a day sitting at Port. He could not be persuaded otherwise, and I had to tell him, very firmly, not to be such a bloody fool. Anyway, his group got a large share of the supplies, so he went away reasonably happy, nursing the remnants of hurt pride.
The drop made an enormous difference to our groups which – with the ‘mothballers’ – now numbered about 5,000 men, of which 3,500, I reckoned, were shock troops who had seen much action. From then on we were able to fight without the anxiety of running out of ammunition, for I still organised the normal night drops by six to nine aircraft, and further mass daylight drops in July kept us well stocked.
One thing only dissatisfied me, I had been clamouring for weeks for mortars, heavy machine-guns, weapons which would put our men on a par with the Germans in fire-power. Artillery could not be used easily in the mountains, and the Germans rarely tried to bring up mountain guns. London kept telling me that the weapons I needed were too heavy to be parachuted, and that we could only be supplied if a plane could land. ‘So why don’t you land a plane?’ I asked them, and – perhaps encouraged by the Liberator drop, from which all the aircraft returned safely – they finally agreed to send in a twin-engined, slow-flying Dakota, if we could fix the landing ground.
Romans and I had taken over an empty chateau, the Chateau Wattern, at Izernore, when this message arrived. It lay on a steep hillside overlooking the landing zone and faced another chateau on the opposite side of the valley. It was the first comfortable headquarters we had during the whole of our months together and was partly furnished, with decent beds, and some good wines in the cellars. We moved in with Paul, the crew of the Liberator he was ‘mothering’, and the remainder of our HQ staff.
Paul radioed SOE our selected field – Izernore – and this was immediately accepted. I ordered a Maquis group to clear a landing strip on the nearly level plateau, and they dug out boulders and stones and levelled hummocks and scrub. I also asked Montréal to arrange for the Dakota to be camouflaged for a day, as such a slow aircraft could not land, be unloaded, and get back to England in one night. His plan was ingenious. He decided that the Dakota should be taxied to a small copse of pine trees close by the landing strip. Maquisards would then cut down many dozens of pines from another part of the area and ‘plant’ them around the plane.
I laid out a flare-path of torches and, exactly on time, I spotted the plane in the summer night, crossing over the mountains. I flashed my recognition signal, got the right reply, and saw the landing wheels come down. Then the powerful beams of the landing lights split the darkness and she came straight in, as though the pilot was touching-down on thousands of yards of concrete runway. It was a fine piece of flying. A man with a torch guided the plane until it was tucked into the copse. The pilot killed his engines, opened his window, and called down in a good American voice: ‘Hi there!’ He clambered down, introduced himself as Colonel Heflin of the USAF, and I shook hands with the rest of his crew, a major, a captain and one sergeant. The main door of the aircraft was opened, and there stood half a dozen men in plain clothes. ‘Bloody politicians,’ I muttered to Romans. I hated these political figures who turned up in increasing numbers as the war progressed. They added an extra element of risk to our security and, to my soldier’s mind, it was better to finish the fighting before starting to squabble over the prizes.
There were three more men in the background, and these I welcomed. One was the surgeon I had been pleading for London to send me for months. Parsifal was his code name; otherwise Major Parker, who had a surgery in Harley Street. He organised our Maquis field hospital and, in the weeks of heavy fighting that lay ahead, he saved many lives with his skill. Not least, he boosted the morale of the maquisards who knew that from then on their wounds would be treated more quickly.
The second man was Bayard, or Captain George Nornable, aged twenty-nine and born in Sheffield, where he worked as a local government officer. He was the small arms and demolition expert and instructor I needed, for all the senior officers in the Maquis simply didn’t have time to train the dozens of new recruits who kept coming in. He had been seconded from the London Scottish to SOE and was wearing glengarry and full uniform. Of medium height, with a broad forehead and curly hair, he set up at Saint Martin-du-Fresnes and, within hours, was caught up in the great German offensive, launched on Bastille Day, 14 July. He joined the men of his command post in a fight against a German patrol and was injured in the chin and hit in the arm by a mortar bomb splinter, which is still there. When things quietened down, he moved to Cinq Chalets, and later visited Parsifal, the surgeon, at the hospital. There he met a lovely girl, Yolande, and he told me: ‘To me, Xavier, she is France, and I shall never forget her.’ He returned to France in 1956 to try to find her, but he never did, for he knew only her Resistance name and could not find out where she lived.
Bayard did an extremely worthwhile job conducting courses at a recruiting camp run by Captain Colin, and dealt with many unexploded plastic charges, wrongly assembled by recruits and liable to blow at the slightest touch. That is real courage, the cold-blooded sort.
The third man was Yvello-Veilleux, a French-Canadian radio operator, requested as an assistant to Paul who – with the heavy fighting and frequent requests for drops – was much overworked.
Our nine passengers were taken to the chateau while Romans and I stayed to see what presents London had sent us. We had a very full stocking. There were heavy machine-guns, mortars, boxes and boxes of mortar bombs, and hundreds of belts of machine-gun ammunition. But the prize present was a jeep, able to trundle over territory in the mountains which none of our ordinary Citroëns could negotiate. Romans and I annexed that.
We joined our visitors at the chateau, fed them, produced some of the absent owner’s best wines, and made arrangements for the politicians and the others to move out the next morning. I saw the rest of his crew to a point above the chateau, looking down on the landing ground. I pointed to the landing ground and asked: ‘Where’s your aircraft, Colonel?’ There was no sign of the Dakota, and he was immensely impressed when I explained how it was hidden in the false copse.
We took the four Americans on a tour of two or three nearby camps, where they were warmly welcomed – and surprised by the spirit, cleanliness, and discipline of the Maquis.
Another packet aboard the Dakota held several up-to-date, British-produced films, and The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich. These were shown one night at a cinema in Oyonnax and Nantua, and the locals saw Desert Victory, The Landings in Normandy, and other films. Montgomery was loudly cheered, and when Paul, Romans, Bayard and Parsifal walked in halfway through, there was a loud cheering for minutes on end. The show ended with the National Anthem, which was greeted with more wild cheering and shouting, and some wag decided to play the German national anthem too. But by mischance the French anthem was replayed, and the place went mad. A little later Montréal, to whom I had given the films (as the main towns were in his area), came to me and said he had received a request from Switzerland to show them. Geneva, of course, was only some 40 miles away, and I thought about this deeply as it could be tricky for a neutral country to show the latest British propaganda films. Eventually I told Montréal that he would have to make his own decision – and winked at him. Later we heard from contacts in Switzerland, and in cables from London, that our films were much appreciated.
In the fortnight following D-Day, London asked me several times to return to England to give an on-the-spot report of our fighting and the liberation of the Ain. They argued that they could learn far more from a personal interview than they got from the brief messages I sent through Paul. But I kept putting them off as I felt that, though we had won a battle, the war was far from finished as far as the Maquis was concerned. Romans told me the decision must be mine, and now, with the Dakota about to leave, I considered the possibility of making a short trip to England. Colonel Heflin offered to take me, but I was worried about getting back to France. ‘I promise I’ll fly you back,’ he said. ‘It might be within forty-eight hours, certainly within a week. And I’ll bring you right back here.’
I had a feeling I might be deserting my friends, and I told Romans I would leave it until the last moment to make up my mind.
‘Xavier, no one will ever think that they have been deserted by you. If you feel you must go, go. If you are on the spot you will be able to tell London what we have done and plead with them to provide the extra arms we need,’ Romans said.
Colonel Heflin was due to fly out the night after his arrival, but London signalled me that the weather over northern France and southern England was going to be bad and ordered him to stay another twenty-four hours. I had already arranged for Paul’s ‘orphans’, the crew of the crashed Liberator, to be flown out, and the delay meant that I could send out one more passenger. This was Loulette Miguet, sister of our valiant transport officer, Jean Miguet. Earlier London had asked me to send a French girl to London who was intelligent, knew the Maquis and could describe its work, I presumed, at lectures. We had selected Loulette as all her family were in the Maquis or Resistance and she had worked as a courier in the Ain. She was reluctant to leave France, but I persuaded her that she could be trained in Britain and might be able to parachute back in later in the war.
On the night of 10 July, Heflin’s Dakota was de-treed, and the engines were run up. I laid a flare-path in a straight line down the bumpy runway for his take-off, saw the Liberator crew were on board and Loulette. I raised my hand to give Heflin the all-clear, but stopped it halfway. I turned to Romans.
‘I’ve decided. I’m going, too.’
We shook hands, he wished me bon voyage, and I climbed aboard just as I was, in my dirty grey suit, battered tie, scuffed boots, and my grey canadienne. I hoped to be back within forty-eight hours.